But whilst, on the one hand, our Christianity is made shallow in proportion as we ignore this solemn reality, on the other hand, it is sometimes paralysed and perverted by our misunderstanding of it.  For, notice, ‘the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet.’  Yes, it is God that bruises, but He uses our feet to do it.  It is God from whom the power comes, but the power works through us, and we are neither merely the field, nor merely the prize, of the conflict between these two, but we ourselves have to put all our pith into the task of keeping down the flat, speckled head that has the poison gland in it.  ’The God of peace’—­blessed be His Name—­’shall bruise Satan under your feet,’ but it will need the tension of your muscles, and the downward force of your heel, if the wriggling reptile is to be kept under.

Turn, now, to the other thought that is here, the promise and pledge of victory in the name, the God of peace.  I have already referred to two similar designations of God in the previous chapter, and if we take them in union with this one in our text, what a wonderfully beautiful and strengthening threefold view of that divine nature do we get!  ‘The God of patience and consolation’ is the first of the linked three.  It heads the list, and blessed is it that it does, because, after all, sorrow makes up a very large proportion of the experience of us all, and what most men seem to themselves to need most is a God that will bear their sorrows with them and help them to bear, and a God that will comfort them.  But, supposing that He has been made known thus as the source of endurance and the God of all consolation, He becomes ‘the God of hope,’ for a dark background flings up a light foreground, and a comforted sorrow patiently endured is mighty to produce a radiant hope.  The rising of the muddy waters of the Nile makes the heavy crops of ‘corn in Egypt.’  So the name ‘the God of hope’ fitly follows the name ’the God of patience and consolation.’

Then we come to the name in my text, built perhaps on the other two, or at least reminiscent of them, and recalling them, ’the God of peace,’ who, through patience and consolation, through hope, and through many another gift, breathes the benediction of His own great tranquillity and unruffled calm over our agitated, distracted, sinful hearts.  In connection with one of those previous designations to which I have referred, the Apostle has a prayer very different in form from this, but identical in substance, when he says ’the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.’  Is not that closely allied to the promise of my text, ’The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly’?  Is there any surer way of ‘bruising Satan’ under a man’s feet than filling him ’with joy and peace in believing’?  What can the Devil do to that man?  If his soul is saturated, and his capacities filled, with that pure honey of divine joy, will he have any taste for the coarse dainties,